I still regret, every word, that day, I never said
by Pawhedge
Summary: In the end it's a stray shot that kills her. Some buffoons accidental ricochet bouncing off the wall and straight into her gut. It's not a bullet at least, she thinks as she screams in agony. Laser wounds were significantly easier to survive than physical shells, if not a bit more painful. What with the burning.(Pidge gets a chance to redo her choices, and decides to choose love)


Hello! Welcome I suppose. This is a fic idea I've been playing with for awhile. What you need to know for now is that its mainly a Pidge fic, though the rest of the main cast will play an important role. There will be no shipping in this fic, at least not for awhile. In my AU the green lion is the one to crash land on earth, and the Garrison steals it and keeps in under lock and key. Pidge eventually sneaks in, cus she's curious, and ends up taking a ride into space unwillingly. She just tries to survive at first, but as she gets better and better at keeping herself alive she decides that this is the perfect opportunity to search for her brother and father. She becomes whatever's necessary to keep going and find them, a bandit, a criminal, a smuggler, but after three years eventually meets her end. Thats pretty much all the information you'll need to know going into this. Don't hesitate to message me if there is something I haven't explained. Happy reading!

* * *

In the end it's just a stray shot that kills her.

Some buffoons accidental ricochet bouncing off the wall and straight into her gut. It's not a bullet at least, she thinks even as she screams in agony. Laser wounds were significantly easier to survive than physical shells, if not a bit more painful. What with the burning.

Pidge falls to her knees, the searing pain unlike anything she's ever felt, like molten lava eating her insides, like someone was twirling her intestines together like spaghetti, like they were squishing them between too hot teeth, blood dripping down in thick clumps, spilt messily like tomato sauce.

_It's just a laser wound_. She thinks, a sob wrenching itself from her throat- logically she knows no freaky giant is eating her organs like Italian cuisine. But it's not much help, not when all she can focus on is the fucking _pain_.

Abruptly she's reminded she's in the middle of a firefight as a Galranian soldier hoist her up by her suit, agitating her wounds and increasing the volume of her screams. If she were more present she'd be embarrassed about the high pitchness of her wobbling voice- it sounds like she's a snot nosed pre-pubescent boy who wasn't reached puberty yet, not exactly fitting for a supposedly invulnerable space pirate.

As it is she doesn't even give the sound of her wailing a second thought, too obsessed with the feeling of her heated blood splashing down her legs and off her shoes, of the throbbing, aching, stabbing sensation that's setting her stomach aflame.

The soldier says something in Galran, and normally she'd be able to easily translate, but as it is she can just barely distinguish that he's talking at all.

She doesn't wax internal poetry about the grief of dying at seventeen, or being killed brutally and in pain, she doesn't cry over the brother and father she never found, the trauma that never healed, or the mother waiting at home, hands pressed to a cold gravestone. It's not that she's heartless- Pidge would normally think that on ones deathbed is in fact the optimal place to spout angst and regrets- but more practically, it's that her last thoughts are '_how the fuck am I going to get out of this_' combined with a '_AAAAAAA THIS FUCKING HURTS MOTHERFUCKER AAAAA!_' .

Her eyes are closed, so she fails to see the glowing purple knife arcing towards her throat as she struggles in the Galra's grip.

She doesn't even realize she's dying until she's dead.

* * *

Before Pidge can even wake up properly she nearly has a stroke. Because um. She _died_. She was dead. She got shot in the stomach- probably through to her back and out the other side too, now that she was thinking about it- and then she felt a sharp, sharp prick in her neck and then she was nothing. She assumes she was stabbed, maybe with one of those electric knife/spear thing-y's the Galra were so fond of using. Which meant she was dead. As a doorknob. As a curious cat. As a wicked witch crushed under a fucking house. Dead.

And yet! She was clearly thinking things- which. Well. She _had_ been an atheist so. This was wild. Was she in Heaven? She found it hard to believe that out of thousands of religions in the known universe, and the hundreds on her puny backwater planet that Christianity was the one true faith, but then, she also thought being dead would be more like, not this, so fuck her, she clearly had no idea what the fuck was going on. The bad news was that if she was in -man's lair he was probably going to yeet her back down into hell himself.

Of course she could be in any number of the religious afterlives she's come across or heard of- or even in one she hadn't. What if that planet full of slug-ish creatures that communicated by eating each other actually had the one true god. What then.

What if reincarnation was real and she was about to wake up in the body of some alien somewhere- actually, if that was the case that wouldn't be too bad. But then, why was she conscious now? Why could she still remember her life? What the fuck was going on?

And then she wakes up. The difference between her odd floating state of being and her current one is enormous- like comparing a tub with a sparkly bath-bomb to the rainbow colored wonder of the oceans of Alharha- she feels _alive_ in a way she hadn't realized she hadn't only moments ago.

She's prone on her back, supported by what feels like, but surely isn't, a mattress, complete with a soothing warm pressure of heaps of blankets tangled around her form. The tangible sensation of fabric on her bare arms is almost too much, so real and soft and _kind_. Her body is relaxed, relief evident in every untensed muscle- the freedom from the harrowing inescapable pain that had radiated violently from her wounds, it's a pleasure too great to describe. The absence of agony is like a drug, she's high with neutrality, like she's never been before with comfort. Happy-ness has no chance against the bliss of blandness.

There's cool conditioned air wafting onto her face- oxygen, or at least it tastes like it, not artificial like Multi-Breath and not stinging like Garlrafill. It's so nostalgic she almost can't stand it- so much fresher than she remembered, so full of familiar smells.

There are voices talking quietly in her earshot, and that's what confuses her the most, because, after a moment of concentration- she finds they're speaking _English_. Not technologically, not psychically through some sort of freaky alien mind-link, but actually speaking in plainly, like, with their _mouths_.

Pidge's eyebrows dip slightly, because, even weirder, they sound…vaguely familiar? Its two masculine voices, one of them louder and bolder, with a higher pitch- the other softer and more worried, rounded and friendly like a golden retriever. She feels an automatic flood of emotions- irritation, and fondness and guilt- and she realizes where she recognizes them from.

She's at the Garrison.

Or. At least, she thinks she is. It's possible that this is what people mean when they say their whole life flashes before their eyes- that she's reviewing memories from her dying brain, or perhaps she survived (even though a part of her screams against the assumption- her gut tells her she's _dead_. That she _died_. Doesn't believe for a second that she survived- it's something she _knows_, not feels.) and she's prisoner aboard a Galra ship, being fed a pleasant dream to keep her compliant.

It doesn't _feel_ like a hallucination, and it doesn't _feel_ like a simulation- but, well, the human mind was fallible, and as much as it sucked sometimes- she was human.

But there was also the absurd possibility this _was_ real, _somehow_\- in which case she shouldn't freak out and start blabbing about getting killed and breaking free from the fuzzy purple alien space matrix, so she'd have to…play it cool. Or something.

Pidge sighed and opened her eyes, not giving herself any more time to worry about what she'd find when doing so. Clearly this wasn't going away anytime soon, so she'd just have to deal until she figures out what was going on.

She's met with the bizarrely normal sight of her old shared room, complete with the Garrisons plain grey walls and that shitty stained carpet. Her bunk is bellow- uh- what was that kids name again? Had something to do with weaponry and started with a…t? Maybe? Trident? No. Whatever. The annoying kid who failed at flirting with girls. His bunk was above hers and she distinctly remembers watching his long freakish spider legs dangle off either side of the bed at night.

Her other roommate, Hunk- what a weird name- slept on the bottom bed of the bunk across from them. They were supposed to have another teammate who'd have the other top bunk, but he dropped out or some shit.

They have a little 'living room' area outside of their bedroom, and she can see glances of its equally dull walls peeking out from behind the blue and white stripped beach towel that they used as a curtain/door. 'For privacy' she recalled- as if they weren't all crammed into the same bedroom anyway.

Pidge takes a moment to just stare, incredulous that what she's seeing in front of her is actually real, but at the same time not totally willing to believe it was false. It was perfectly unchanged from when she was innocent and fourteen- but she wasn't fourteen, she was seventeen, and she definitely wasn't innocent.

Shakily she pushes herself up to a sitting position, soft navy blankets falling from her feet as she dangles them off the edge of the bed. She listens for a second, to her two old idiot teammates arguing semi-quietly in the other room.

Something about pancakes. In a way the subject is a relief, because it affirms what she had unknowingly assumed- she is in the past. It's not that she remembers this conversation or anything- the digital clock on the wall reads nine twenty four, Saturday, which meant normally she'd still be asleep and would have no recollection of the whispered conversation going on outside- but if she was seventeen, if she _had_ survived somehow, and was miraculously transported or perhaps traded to the Garrison, then she'd be under maximum security in some hospital room, not overhearing her stupid roommates argue about whether or not chocolate chips belonged in pancakes. Which they _obviously_ did, she was oddly on, uh, whatever-his-name-was's side.

Cautiously, she gets up, gently putting her foot on the prickly carpet, with the heel touching it first before slowly placing the ball of her foot and then toes. It's a very quiet way to walk, especially on carpet or dirt- not as silent as putting her weight on the sides of her feet and moving forward awkwardly like that, but doing that hurt her legs and took up far too much concentration. The two boys probably wouldn't of heard her if she was stomping anyway, but it didn't hurt to be careful.

She snuck her way to the back of the room, opposite to the curtained doorway out to the living room, softly grabbing the handle of the bathroom door and twisting slowly. She opened it, her hand still kept in the same place on the nob, before painstakingly reversing the twisting movement in her wrist until the handle was at its normal position. She let go, and entered the bathroom, before repeating the same movements to close the door.

She listened for a moment, breathing in soundlessly through her barely opened mouth. The boys were still arguing, though from this distance she couldn't tell about what, probably nothing important. Satisfied, she walked to the mirror, peering at her own reflection.

It was immediately uncomfortable, in a visceral way she wasn't prepared for, to stare at a version of herself she no longer precisely remembered.

Her hair was shorter, and loose, free of a ponytail like it almost never was in the future- messy like a birds nest after being slept in. She was still wearing Matt's glasses, but she had forgotten what they had specifically looked like before she had upgraded them- they didn't have the yellow-ish tint on the glass, nor the reinforced sides- they were brown and spindly and perfectly normal. She couldn't see the rest of her body via the small mirror, but holding arm up she glumly took in the pathetic state of her muscles. Her arms were pencil thin, even with the slight amount of meat she had gained from the Garrisons training and hearty meals- all of her hard worked instantly vanished.

Pidge wasn't an athletic person by any means, and cared far more about her intelligence and technological skills than the state of her body, but she had trained ceaselessly to get herself to a state in which a physical fight wasn't a death sentence. And now she was back to fucking square one.

Cringing, she twisted her body this way and that, peering at the differences with irritation and unease. She still had baby fat on her cheeks. Her freckles were less prominent than they would be, thanks to her current lack of exposure to the sun.

She had no scars. None. Just smooth and slightly pimpled skin. Her legs weren't as hairy either she thought, rolling her pajama pant leg back down.

Hesitantly, she lifted her oversized tee-shirt (oh wow she still had a binder, she had totally forgot about that) to anxiously glare at her stomach. It was fine. No gaping bloody hole, burning and sizzling through to her insides, cooking her alive.

She reached her hand down, fingers shakily touching the empty spot, and just finding slightly clammy skin. Right.

She moved her chin up, and with some difficulty tried to glance down at her neck. No stab wound their either. Obviously. It was weird, but not as weird as the stomach thing- she had barely even felt the throat cutting bit.

She dropped her arms, starring at herself for a moment longer. This was fun.

She let out a lofty sigh, taking off matt's glasses before bending down near the sink and splashing a handful of cold water on her face. She toweled herself off with whatever-his-name-was's stupid sesame street towel, which he had bought for 'ironic reasons', and stretched, hearing a satisfying click come from her back.

She brushed her teeth methodically, amazed at the concept of doing so with real human toothpaste, before swiftly remembering how much she fucking hated the taste of mint. She brushed her hair hurriedly, mainly just to get the worst knots out, and then put everything away.

She should probably go see what her teammates were up to. It was better to get it over with now and not build the interaction up dramatically for herself she thought confidently, feet not even attempting to move.

It was only a three years difference between her old present and her current one- she wasn't _that_ different. And besides, whatever-his-name-was and Hunk were sixteen right now, if she remembered correctly, she was older than them technically- that was funny right? Not ha ha funny, like sad funny, but whatever. She was sad funny now, like a fucking crying clown. Bo-bo the fool has to bumble through human interaction a second time and is still not any better at it and may in fact be worse.

Pidge groaned and shook her head, before reaching towards the door and flicking off the light, unwilling to give herself any more time to sulk. This was happening whether she liked it or not, she'd just have to put on her big girl/ big boy- because yeah, that was a thing she still had to do again great- pants and get this over with.

She tried to walk causally this time, brushing back the dumb towel curtain without any pre-empt and entering the living room.

Whatever-his-name-was and Hunk were huddled together on the couch, with Hunk sitting properly like a human being and the annoying kid crouched like a gangly thin gargoyle on the arm of the furniture, despite the fact there was plenty of room to inhabit on the larger boys other side.

They were somehow still talking about fucking pancakes, though by now they were onto whether or not they should be putting blue-berries or raspberries in them. She remembers this about them now, how they could circle the same topic endlessly with each other, finding new ways to bicker about the same thing. It used to hurt, reminding her too much of her relationship with her brother. She's not sure what she feels now.

"Hey" She greets tiredly, moving as calmly as she can to the beanbag by the dinky T.V and collapsing into it lazily. Man she used to fucking love this thing- it was a Snorlax beanbag, and probably the most comfortable thing ever. Also, y'know, a Snorlax- which was awesome, considering Munchlax was her second favorite pokemon. (Dyeoxys being her first)

The two on the couch blink at her, with barely supressed amazement on Hunks part, and obvious surprise on Whatever-his-name-was's face.

"I didn't know you were even capable of waking up before twelve on a weekend, man- you feeling alright?" Whatever-his-name-was asks, somewhat astonished. Pidge raises an eyebrow, but before she can reply Hunk elbows his friend sharply and speaks first.

"Don't listen to Lance- it's good to, like, see you up! We were thinking of going down to the kitchens and making pancakes, uh, d'you wanna, um, come?" He wonders, head cocked to the side kindly, looking a tiny bit nervous. (fuck his name was Lance, there wasn't even a t fucking in there) He probably expected her to reject him, and she probably should- she had already broke pattern by waking up so early, she shouldn't gather any more suspicion.

But. Well. Obviously she was going after her brother and dad again, which meant she had to break into the Garrisons top secret facilities, again, and steal a giant alien cat ship thing, again, and meticulously comb through the galaxy for a trace of them, _again_\- and she'd probably never see these annoying, but well-meaning idiots, again.

One breakfast surely couldn't hurt.

"Sure, why not." She replies, and watches with some amusement as Lance gapes at her. Who knew, this might even be fun.

* * *

The kitchen is pretty much the same as she remembers it, sub-par appliances and stained floor included. There's one burner on the stove that's still on, despite the lack of anyone using it, crumbs litter the counter tops liberally, and some fool opened, like, twelve drawers without shutting them. The whole room smells like burned macaroni.

Hunk tuts under his breath disapprovingly, and moves about the room cleaning/ fixing the various messes. Pidge moves with Lance and sits down on the stools overlooking one of the islands, watching Hunk gracefully sway from item to item.

'Cooking together' usually translated to 'watch hunk cook as we keep him company' which was why she had avoided joining the two of them her first go around. She had been a decent liar, but hadn't wanted to risk incriminating herself with telling stories while trying to entertain Hunk.

She wasn't particularly worried about it now, seeing as spinning a lie about some fun outing with a fake family wasn't nearly as difficult as trying to trick The Grand Emperor of Dalanar, coming up with a completely fabricated life and personality, a fake accent in a language she barely spoke, both hands and feet bound, inches away from being thrown into the giant and razor sharp teeth of a Tulth'ia flesh-eater if she was so much as even slightly found suspicious of stealing the Magmum Lithum, which famously hard to get off gold dust she was covered in. She's not really sure how she made it out of that one, ten hundred Jurin richer and possessing the Magmum Lithum no less. Also with all of her body parts.

Hunks beginning to get out the ingredients now, able to access even the tallest shelves with ease. Pidge tries not to glare with envy- some people really got all the luck.

Lance turns to her abruptly, apparently something just occurring to him.

"so. Pancakes- are you a blueberry man or what?" He inquires intensely, looking very serious about this incredibly stupid topic he has yet to drop. Pidge shrugs.

"I'm more of a chocolate chip person actually." She responds, amused despite herself as Hunk instantly lets out a groan of anguish and Lance pumps his fist in exaggerated victory.

"Ha! I told you!" He laughs, pointing with a smirk at his friend. Pidge can viscerally feel Hunk rolls his eyes despite his turned back.

"I mean, your still, like, objectively wrong, but I guess two people being wrong is still greater than one being right, so you win." He responds archly, and Pidge blinks, a little unused to this side of Hunk. With her he had mostly been shyly nice, obviously somewhat intimidated by her brusque and business like attitude combined with her occasional mean streak. She had never really seen him be sarcastic or fakely angry before. It was, not unpleasant exactly, but definitely weird. An out of body experience, of a sort.

"Hey, you're the one making them, if you don't like chocolate then you don't have to." She adds reasonably- that had been her dads rule, as the primary food-maker, that while he'd take request and objections reasonably, if he wanted to make something, he'd damn well make it. Her mother had been the only one to be able to change his mind on that sort of thing, her and Matt had been powerless to his whims. Hunks sighs dramatically.

"I like chocolate- I'm not a psychopath- but I just think, if you're putting syrup on something the last thing it needs is more sugar- but whatever! Ms. spoiled Princess over here wants chocolate in his pancakes, and heaven forbid I get in the way of that." Hunk teases, his faux seriousness fading into a silly smile as he talks. It's such a friendly expression, Pidge feels an immediate stab of guilt- for leaving him behind, for acting cruelly when he got too close, for planning on doing it all over again. This kid deserved better- a better teammate then her, that was for sure.

She wonders what happened to her old teammates, the one in her…other timeline, if that's what was truly going on here- did they get a new member? or were they stuck with yet another empty bed. Did the Garrison question them? Punish them for her transgressions? Did they miss her? She'd never really thought about it before, too involved with her own survival and her quest to find her family to consider the lost teammates she had left behind. The Garrison program hadn't been her dream, not after her brother and father disappeared- but it was these kids dream, and she had carelessly abandoned it.

And she was going to have to do it again. No matter how much she was maybe starting to feel a little bit bad, it's not like she could do anything else. Her family would always come first- above everyone else, including her.

Lance scoffs, waking her out of her internal musing.

"I think you mean and charming Prince, weird slip up to make, but I can be understanding. " He proclaimed, sniffing in pretend disdain. Hunk let out a short laugh, mixing the batter in his bowl steadily even as he talked.

"Right, how silly of me." He joked, and Pidge let out a chuckle, feeling like an intruder. Lance caught onto the sound, turning to her slightly, a curious expression on his face.

"So what made you decide to come down with us- no offence, but you like, never want to hang out." Hunk lets out an admonishing '_Lance'_ quietly, but also seems interested in her reply. Pidge lifts her shoulders in a small shrug- she can't exactly tell them the truth.

"I' hungry." She offers simply, and can tell by their expressions they don't quite believe it, especially Hunk- but are willing to let it lie for now.

"Fair enough!" Hunk hums over the sizzle of batter being poured on the pan, a tasty smell filling the air. Pidge takes out her phone, pretending to browse as the conversation carries on without her.

The date says August first, two thousand and nineteen, and Pidge has to stop herself from wincing. She's two months and a full year away from when the Garrison captures green. She's thirteen not fourteen.

Shit.


End file.
